


Has Me Dead

by archive_rat



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Angelica Schuyler Being an Asshole, BAMF Angelica Schuyler, But not in a good way, Drama, Families of Choice, Human Disaster Aaron Burr, More tags to come as the work progresses, The Schuyler sisters aren't sisters in this one, The couple at the beginning doesn't stay together, Thomas Jefferson Being an Asshole, TikTok, but in a good way, celebrity, so i'm not tagging it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-18 03:21:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28736409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archive_rat/pseuds/archive_rat
Summary: Seeking money to help fund his college education, Aaron Burr, a minor TikTok celebrity who specializes in true crime, joins a new TikTok creator house.After the murder of a journalist who covers internet trends brings overnight fame to the new house, the house members, who include Alexander Hamilton, Angelica Schuyler, and the rest, are stressed and at one another’s throats. Their contracts with a talent agency that specializes in social-media creators oblige them to remain together in the house and keep producing content; secretly, they investigate each other, trying to find out which of them committed the murder.Adding to the mess, their followers on social media start to take sides: they examine videos for clues, post doctored evidence, and keep the rumor mill churning. Eventually, a group of the teenagers will have to band together—and bring their individual talents to bear on a high-stakes mission—in order to expose an unwelcome truth.
Relationships: Aaron Burr & Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr & Angelica Schuyler
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

Technically, this was the most important day of Aaron’s life so far. But for some reason he had a terrible feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Move-in day had arrived, and the front doors to a five-story stone-and-marble mansion on Manhattan’s Upper West Side—Aaron’s home for the next year—were flung wide open. His new housemates, whom he had never met before, were already jogging in and out, luggage in arm and befuddled families in tow. Aaron had never lived in a home bigger than the apartment he currently shared with his aunt and uncle, but as a native of Queens, he had a New Yorker’s clinical eye for the value of real estate. This place was worth sixty million dollars, easy. Not only was the address right in the heart of the city, but also—as Aaron and his family had read with astonishment when the agency had dropped off the paperwork—the mansion had five bedrooms, a courtyard garden, a disco room, a pool, a basketball court, and a private rooftop with a bar and a hot tub. 

“You’re underage,” Aaron’s uncle had told him sternly. “I had better not see videos of you using that bar or hot tub.”

And it was free. In fact, Aaron was getting paid to be there. Not much, but enough to take a bite out of the cost of college, if he planned it right. As his new housemates bustled around, their parents hung back, letting the teenagers ask questions of the agency staffers who had come to hand over the keys and make sure the move-in went smoothly. The parents didn’t—maybe couldn’t—really understand the terms of this new world the teenagers belonged to; didn’t understand why a talent management agency was paying their children to live together in a mansion and make videos for TikTok. Truth be told, the parents didn’t understand what TikTok was, even though their children had explained the app to them patiently, had shown them videos, had filmed and posted videos in front of them and shown them how the likes and video views ticked up into the hundreds of thousands. Each of the teenagers moving into the mansion, Aaron included, had been identified as a promising content creator and brought here to live with the others in a “creator house.” 

Aaron had not realized until now how much he had dreaded this moment. 

To begin with, he was not necessarily good with people. He had never lived with people his own age, let alone people who had the kind of outsized personalities that he saw when he looked at his new housemates’ TikTok accounts. Angelica was a makeup artist, and she knew exactly what she thought about everything. She could produce, in an instant, a provocative opinion on any subject, and she could do so while painting what her followers praised as an absolutely perfect smoky eye. (“Being a bitch is my business, and business is good,” she liked to say.)

Eliza, a star on what she called “witch tok,” was forever putting strange things into jars, lighting candles, and talking about mystical dangers too obscure for Aaron to understand. Thomas and Alexander, boyfriends with a joint account, specialized in pulling crazy pranks on each other. (Aaron thought most of their pranks were pretty mean-spirited, and he sometimes wondered how the two could stand each other, let alone be, as they often said, wildly in love.) Peggy was a rapper who bopped to rhymes about fanfiction and superheroes and other geeky subjects.

Then there was Aaron. His niche on TikTok was true crime. People who liked true crime often had a junkie’s mania for the subject, which was Aaron’s best guess as to why he had become as popular on TikTok as he had. He had been name-checked in a few blogs and subreddits that covered true crime, and the consensus on him was that his “icy” demeanor made the crimes he discussed seem even more chilling. Aaron worried that, once his new housemates caught him on video, people would figure out that he wasn’t quiet and collected at all—just awkward on camera. He worried that people would stop liking his videos. He worried that his housemates wouldn’t like him. He worried that he would disappoint his sister. He worried that he would shrivel under the glare of the attention that his new situation—living in this house, with these people—was sure to bring. 

The house’s name was Has Me Dead House. (Every creator house had a name, for branding purposes.) The talent management agency had asked the house members to submit suggestions for the house name, and their suggestions, Aaron later learned, were all over the map: Revolution House, The Great House Detective, Cancel Couture House, Thomas and Friends House, The House Where Everyone Is Problematic Except One Person, The House That Formed a Second After Houses Stopped Being Cool. The agency turned them all down. 

After the agency chose the house’s name, Angelica posted a video in which she argued—while applying an immaculate heart-shaped lip—that the phrase “has me dead,” like so much slang online, came from speakers of color, and that internet power-brokers would have to reckon soon with the way they appropriated slang from minoritized communities as trendy internet language. The agency asked her to take down the video. Angelica made another video about the request. She was not fired.

Angelica walked over and stood in front of him now. Aaron stood awkwardly on the sidewalk in front of the mansion, a travel bag in each hand. His goodbyes with his sister had taken a long time, and now that his sister had left, he felt very alone.

“You’re the last one to get your stuff inside, so you have the last choice of bedrooms,” she told him matter-of-factly. “It’s still a good bedroom, though—it has a private elevator that goes to the roof, if you don’t want to use the stairs all the time.”

The media glare that he feared so much was about to light up. The families had left, per an earlier agreement, by 2 p.m. sharp, and the agency staffers had left at the same time. The housemates would have just 20 minutes to settle in and introduce themselves to each other before a photographer arrived to film them for a video trailer to advertise the new creator house. A writer for the _New York Times_ was coming, too, to interview them for some kind of article. Aaron was nervous as hell about that one. His family read the _New York Times_. 

Angelica walked up the stairs to the front door and turned. Aaron had always expected, somehow, that Angelica would be the leader of the house. He wondered whether Angelica had expected the same. She said, “You’ve got to hurry up. The _Times_ writer came early. She’s already interviewing Peggy.”

“What’s she like?” Aaron asked. He didn’t know whether he was asking about the writer or Peggy.

Angelica rolled her eyes and said, “She’s one of those people who thinks having chunky glasses is a personality trait.” 

***

She was talking about the writer, it turned out. Beverley Bullet of the _New York Times_ had curly hair and, as promised, very chunky glasses, which—now that Angelica had Aaron overthinking the glasses—she perhaps treated, as she peered around the house and took notes, as a portable window that separated The Observer from The World. Or perhaps Aaron was projecting himself onto her. He had his own windows: the screen of his laptop, the screen of his phone. When he researched crimes, when he talked about them on video, those windows protected him, he felt, from the terrible things that could happen out there in the world, the terrible things those crimes consisted of.

He couldn’t say that to a journalist, of course. What attracts a person to true crime? Is it immoral, is it _freakish_ , to wade in the terrors of others? Was a desire to look morbid reality in the face what drew followers to his TikTok account and him to the literature on the history of crime? Or rather was it a desire to learn how to defend oneself against danger, or a desire to feel danger in safe surroundings? “I want to hear about people who are having a worse day than I am,” he used to say glibly of his interest in true crime. And that was untrue, a weak joke that he didn’t mean; but a part of him did mean it. Aaron was always vaguely aware of a chill of immense sadness standing—waiting—at the door of any room he happened to be in.

He also couldn’t say _that_ to a journalist. He had a minute to gather his thoughts because she wanted to look around at the marble walls and deep leather chairs and frescoed ceilings. The mansion’s true glory was the roof, which had a view of Central Park: _the Park_ , as New Yorkers called it, as though only one park in the world was worth mentioning. Of course, she wanted to go up and see the view. As they walked up the stairs to the roof, he tried to direct the conversation to what would make his family proud. What his family would want to have the _New York Times_ say about him. 

Princeton University had offered Aaron a place in its freshman class, and not an hour went by without his thoughts turning to those gray spires in New Jersey and blessing every moment of work that had led to his opening that fat orange-and-black envelope. The university gave him a scholarship that covered his tuition, but he still needed to work up enough money for his room and board, and his salary from living in the creator house would give him what he needed to cover his freshman year. Aaron told Beverley Bullet about Princeton, about his ambition to make documentaries someday, about the money he could save up while he took a gap year before starting college.

“This house is giving us all a chance to reach a bigger audience, to get started on a career, or just to get ready for the next step in life,” he told her. “This is a house of… of opportunities.” 

“But this is also a house of secrets,” she said, and waited. After a moment, she prompted him, “You have to admit that you guys have real lives that are different from your public personas.” He must have given her a blank look, because she tapped her notebook and said, “I’m a reporter. I do research.”

A few long seconds passed. He had no idea what she could be talking about. Finally, she must have taken pity on him, because she said, “I think I have enough material for this part of the story. If you could go down and send Eliza up, I’d like to talk to her next.”

Aaron fled without any further encouragement. He loped down the stairs and looked around. The front entryway was immense, and he took a moment to admire the arched ceiling, complete with a freaking _chandelier_ , and the wide floors of glowing wood. This was a long way from a cramped two-bedroom apartment. The teenagers had been left alone in the mansion to sort themselves out, and Aaron tried to guess where the others would go for a getting-to-know-you conversation. Would they have searched out a living room, or would they have dived straight into the luxury of the swimming pool? Should he have gone looking for them in their bedrooms? 

Suddenly, a muffled shriek sounded from far above. Did someone scream? He knew what a real scream sounded like. He found himself running up the stairs. The rooftop was empty. 

When Aaron was a child, one day when he was out playing by himself in a park, he found his attention monopolized by a dark pool under a cluster of trees. A terrible feeling pulled at his innards. He began walking towards the pond, step after reluctant step, while his thoughts slowed to imitate a narrator in one of the documentaries his older sister watched: “Down in the depths, the mummy awaits…” When he looked into the pond, a mummy was indeed inside: a dead squirrel, standing straight up, its face indistinct and its entire body covered with white stuff. Was the white stuff fungus? He would never find out.

That first day at the mansion, that same feeling, just as terrible, just as ineluctable, pulled Aaron to the edge of the roof. He braced his hands against the marble guard wall, chest high, that surrounded the roof. He looked down.

Beverley Bullet was lying on the pavement five stories below, a dark pool widening around her head.


	2. Chapter 2

The next few hours were indistinct. Aaron was vaguely aware of the police arriving, of sitting beside his housemates on an absurdly big sofa and answering questions about who they were and what had happened. He thought he heard a dull roar outside: maybe a crowd had gathered to look at the body or to watch the police work over the crime scene. Maybe the noise was just blood rushing through his head. 

At one point he was standing. The police had gone away somewhere. His housemates told him to sit down because he looked pale. 

He sat down on the carpet and looked up at the glittering light fixtures, the gold-leaf decorations. The teenagers had moved in only a few hours before.

“We have to leave,” he said. “Right? We have to leave.”

The others looked back at him, fear on their faces.

***

They could not leave, as it turned out. They had signed contracts, and the talent management agency that employed them—though the staffers they spoke to seemed both horrified and _pissed off_ that someone had died on the house’s _first day of existence_ —brooked no doubt over whether the teens would live out the year in the house. Breaking the contract would cost Aaron more money than he or his family had seen in their combined lifetimes. Aaron tried to see it from the agency’s perspective. The rent for the mansion was probably millions of dollars a year, and the agency would have signed a contract of its own promising to pay that rent. They were resolved to get their money’s worth out of their investment.

Evening fell on a sad company of teenagers, now returned to the absurdly big sofa, left to finish their big welcome under deeply unwelcome circumstances. None of them felt like playing getting-to-know-you games or even raising more than a few words of conversation. Somewhere in another reality, Aaron reflected, they were exploring the mansion wonder by wonder, throwing themselves onto the furniture, taking selfies on the rooftop, maybe running off to find trouble in the city. But he was stuck here, in a house that suddenly felt like a prison. Moreover, he was stuck in a house with someone very dangerous. Unless she had fallen accidentally—he had, at the moment, no idea what the police believed—one of them had pushed Beverley Bullet off that roof.

Aaron went to his bedroom, where he had dropped off his luggage and phone (dead battery) before meeting the reporter. He changed into a tee shirt and pajama pants, then plugged in his phone and laptop so that he would be ready to get to work the next morning. He got into bed and closed his eyes. He didn’t sleep that night.

***

Early the next morning, Aaron booted up his laptop and began researching the previous day’s incident. Already, a few local newspapers had posted stories about the reporter’s fatal fall. A tourist in Central Park, admiring the mansions across the street from the Park, had seen her backed up against the rooftop’s guard wall, holding a phone-shaped object high in one hand. That was a big factor, Aaron saw, in the first wave of headlines about her death: “Internet Reporter May Have Fallen to Death While Taking Selfie, Police Say.” 

Aaron knew from long experience of reading newspaper coverage of crimes that headlines are like book titles: their purpose is not just to tell a story, but to _sell_ a story. Headlines used true pieces of what happened, but the editors who wrote them sifted those true pieces out of a whole mess of true pieces in order to make a frame that had the pleasing shape of a fable: an internet reporter, taking a selfie, meets an ironic death. Journalists told the truth about events, but their obligation to give events the shape of a story sometimes them led to exclude ill-fitting details that, in a crime investigation, might turn out to be crucial. Had the police been confident when they said Bullet died while taking a selfie, or had they been doubtful, only for that version of events to rise to the top because it made for a good headline?

Aaron tried to remember the questions the police had asked the day before. They had wanted to know, he vaguely remembered, whether the teenagers had seen Beverley Bullet with a phone. When the reply came that she was carrying a phone and a notebook, the police had seemed surprised. This meant, Aaron surmised, that neither the phone nor the notebook was on the body. Everyone carried a phone; that would be expected, no reason for surprise. A notebook was new news.

But a missing phone and notebook made it difficult to call the reporter’s fall an accident. Were the police withholding information from the press? If so, for what purpose? Or did they find the missing items in the bushes somewhere after talking to the teenagers?

Angelica rapped on Aaron’s door. “House meeting,” she said. “If we’re going to be producing content here, then we need to decide who’s doing what in which rooms of the house. Plus, we have to agree on house rules. And talk about what happened. All that stuff.” She pulled a grimace.

By the time Aaron made it upstairs from his bedroom to the room with the absurdly big sofa—some unspoken agreement, or maybe just shared trauma, seemed to have made that room the house’s center of operations—the others were already assembled. They were talking about the events of the afternoon before.

“You were the last person to see her,” Alexander said to Aaron. “What do you think happened?”

Aaron thought quickly. Like it or not, he was going to be living in a house with these people. And he had seen enough examples of crimes that targeted someone too close to a dreaded truth—family annihilators taking out their spouses and children, rather than let anyone know they had faked a job or a college degree—that he didn’t want to signal any kind of suspicion. 

“I think she fell off the rooftop while she was trying to take a selfie,” he said. “That’s what the police think, according to the newspapers, and the police know a lot more than we do.”

The others seemed to relax at that statement. Were they taking him as an authority because he was the true crime guy? Or did they take for granted that the police were telling the press everything they knew? Aaron could list a dozen cases off the top of his head in which the police gave the public false information in the hope of fooling a suspect into letting down their guard. 

Whatever the case, the vibe in the room changed as tangibly as if someone had turned the thermostat to a warmer temperature. They were teenagers; maybe they could only _function_ , really, by doing ordinary teenage things. Aaron’s uncle had once told him that in times of crisis, people don’t rise to the occasion; they fall back on their training. What training did the budding internet stars gathered in that room _have_ except their knowledge of how to be ordinary kids? 

They turned now, maybe too eagerly, to the mundane task of working up a list of house rules: no leaving a mess for others to clean, no filming others without permission, no barging into each other’s bedrooms, no whipping up artificial drama for views. (“The drama in this house will be 100% all-natural and organic,” Alexander joked.) And they used the house meeting as an occasion to make the introductions that they had not been able to make on their first day together.

Angelica took the floor first. She called dibs on the indoor courtyard, which had the best light, and then quickly discussed her plans to use the next year to find ways to make her makeup videos “more of a revelation” for her viewers.

“I find the makeup world’s celebration of femininity empowering,” she said. “For one thing, makeup tutorials show how femininity is an achievement. Like it’s fucking _labor_ and _skill_. You’re going to find this out, because I’m going to ask you guys to come on my channel and try doing what I do, and I _guarantee_ that most of you will not know how to walk in heels or do makeup.”

Aaron glanced at Peggy and Eliza, but they were just looking at him, mirth on their faces.

Peggy spoke next. The daughter of engineers who lived in Seattle, she had been trying for years to convince her parents that she could make a real career from her music. The chance to move to New York City was a dream come true: living in the heart of the hip-hop world would improve her chances, she hoped, of getting a contract with a record company. 

Peggy had been outside with the talent agency’s photographer, filming footage for the house’s promotional material, when Beverley Bullet had hit the ground. 

“My back was turned to the house when it happened,” she said. “I heard the noise, I saw the body, I called 911. I wish I had been facing the other way. Maybe I could have warned her.”

Aaron noticed that she had dropped her eyes and was intently studying the carpet.

Eliza’s last name was Howe. She had grown up in Salem, Massachusetts, and she was, she explained, a descendant of one of the witches who had been executed in the Salem Witch Trials. Aaron already knew this from her TikTok account, but he found the story of her ancestor thrilling even in the repetition.

“My great-times-seven grandmother,” she said, “was accused of mixing potions that caused men to have menstrual pains. She was accused of taking spectral form and flying through the town at night to prick hypocrites in their beds with pins. For this, she was hanged at Gallows Hill and buried in unconsecrated ground. Now people visit her grave from all over the world to do her honor.”

The theme of her videos during her year in Has Me Dead House, she explained, was supposed to be how she learned to adjust her small-town Salem witchcraft to fit the big city.

“Salem’s a super deep magical hub, but its community emphasizes more traditional forms of magic,” she said. “Witches from New York tell me that, although some groups here are very traditional, magic here tends to have an eclectic, punk, D.I.Y. shape to it. Also, with witchcraft you sometimes have to work with local spirits to get things done. New York City itself is supposed to have a spirit, but everyone says it's way too big and unruly to work with. So I'm going to investigate the spirits of smaller places within New York, like streets and neighborhoods. I’m going to learn how different neighborhoods support different workings that I’m trying to do.”

Aaron made a mental note to look up _workings_.

Thomas and Alexander were the most famous people in the room. Certain corners of the internet celebrated their coupledom as proof that fandom dreams do come true. Just a few years before, Thomas was a YouTuber with a midsize following, filming videos in which he reviewed expensive clothes (he claimed to have “invented” purple velvet) and ran around getting into trouble. Alexander was a YouTuber who mixed political and pop-culture commentary. Their audiences started shipping them: photoshopping them together as a couple, drawing them in wedding tuxes, writing fanfiction in which they met and fell in love in a hundred different universes. They wound up getting together for real, which sent their viewers into fits of ecstasy. Swept on a wave of rising viewer numbers, they set up a joint channel, which, as time passed, had turned into a prank channel in which the two young men played increasingly savage pranks on each other: Thomas jumping out from a doorway and blowing an airhorn in Alexander’s ear; Alexander drawing an obscene picture on Thomas’s face while he slept on an airplane; Thomas hiring an actor to play a police officer and pretend to arrest Alexander on the street.

“We’re not going to prank you as hard as we prank each other,” Thomas said to the others. “But seriously, y’all, we might prank you. We’ll try to take it easy on you. If you see something weird in the fridge, don’t eat it. If you see one of our phones ringing, don’t pick it up. Don’t catch a prank that we’ve set up for each other. We’re very intense, because we’re used to it.”

By now, the house members were draped over different parts of the sofa in attitudes of relaxation. Peggy was lying on the carpet with her legs hooked up over the seat cushions. They might have been a high-school clique hanging out after school. It felt weirdly normal.

“Do you know what time you were born?” Alexander asked Aaron.

“Here we go,” Thomas said.

Aaron, it transpired, had his rising sign in Virgo and was born under a Taurus moon. Alexander explained how that fit with his online persona and his interest in true crime. After Alexander ran through everyone’s astrological chart—“Of course,” he sighed when he learned that Angelica was a Gemini—Angelica used her phone to snap a quick photo of everyone sitting together.

“Okay, y’all, I pronounce us formally introduced by the laws of Gen Z,” Thomas said.

“If we were Millennials, what would we have done instead of the zodiac?” Peggy asked.

“We would have sorted everyone into their freaking Hogwarts houses,” Angelica said. “Or, no, we would have figured out what _Sex and the City_ character everyone is.”

Thomas stood and stretched. He was wearing a Supreme sweatshirt, which, since the whole point of the brand was that the clothes looked like old laundry and cost hundreds of dollars apiece, struck Aaron as pretty obnoxious. “I would never watch that show,” he said. “If I had to watch it, like if I had to make a video about the show, I would hire an intern to watch it for me.”

Alexander said, “That is such a Miranda thing to say.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...an astrology bitch who has everyone’s birth chart memorized, and a short king. In this case, AH is both at once.
> 
> The idea of falling back on your training is going to be a theme in this story.
> 
> I'm not an astrology person, but I do think Geminis wake up every day and choose violence.
> 
> The name of the talent agency's photographer is Samuel Seabury. He'll be back.


End file.
